Publisher's Weekly Review
In Rushdie's ambitious and rewarding novel, a mysterious billionaire and his three adult sons change their names and move to New York City in an attempt to reinvent themselves after tragedy. Spanning the years from the Obama inauguration to the current political moment, the main story is narrated by René, an aspiring filmmaker who resides in the Gardens, the same fictional downtown Manhattan neighborhood as the pseudonymous "Golden" family of the book's title. Each of the Golden sons is introduced in turn-the intellectual Petya, the artistically inclined Apu, their searching half-brother "D"-as René gradually comes to understand their origins and implicate himself in their dramas. After the patriarch, Nero, marries a much younger woman named Vasilia, her increasingly intimate relationship with René drags the Goldens' history violently into the present. Replete with allusions to literature, film, mythology, and politics, the novel simultaneously channels the calamities of Greek drama and the information overload of the internet. The result is a distinctively rich epic of the immigrant experience in modern America, where no amount of money or self-abnegation can truly free a family from the sins of the past. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Rushdie (Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2015, etc.) returns with a topical, razor-sharp portrait of life among the very rich, who are, of course, very different from the rest of us.Where Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities sent up the go-go, me-me Reagan/Bush era, Rushdie's latest novel captures the existential uncertainties of the anxious Obama years. Indeed, its opening sentence evokes the image of the newly inaugurated president "as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds," even as our narrator, shellshocked like everyone else in that time of plunging markets and ballooning mortgages, worried that assassination was the inevitable outcome. Against this backdrop arrives a mysterious immigrant who has taken for himself what he imagines to be a suitably aspirational name: Nero Golden. So beguiling is Golden that, tucked away in a secret palace in a New York affordable only to the very wealthy, he proves an instant lure for our narrator, a filmmaker in search of a subject. Each member of the Golden household harbors secrets, sexual and financial and criminal, but the plot thickens considerably when a Russian arriviste, "Vasilisa the Fair," inserts herself into the Goldens' world, ticking down a checklist of all the pleasures she can provide for Nero given the proper options package: "You see the categories are ten, fifteen, twenty," she tells Golden of her monthly allowance needs. "I recommend generosity." It seems clear we are not meant to think of Obama but of his successor, whose election closes the book and who gives us Rushdie's decidedly unfunny, decidedly unironic condemnation of an "America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans' masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath." A sort of Great Gatsby for our time: everyone is implicated, no one is innocent, and no one comes out unscathed, no matter how well padded with cash. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A canny observer whose imagination is fueled by anger, bemusement, and wonder over humankind's delusions and destructiveness, Rushdie writes novels that range from the mischievously fantastical, as in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), to the sharply satiric and unnervingly realistic. His newest, a rampaging saga of power and blood, is centered on a Manhattan oasis, the Gardens, a shared stretch of verdant land behind a row of historic homes in Greenwich Village. On the day America's first African American president takes office, a mysterious construction and development billionaire and his three adult sons take up residence in a long-empty Gardens mansion. Their country of origin is aggressively concealed; their assumed names are startlingly hubristic. The patriarch, charming and menacing, is Nero Golden. His eldest is Petronius, called Petya, a man of sad, brilliant strangeness. Just a year younger, suave Lucius Apuleius, nicknamed Apu, is an artist. Dionysus, known as D, is a half-brother born 18 years later than Apu, his mother's identity known only to Nero. Gardens native René, an aspiring filmmaker, quickly discerns that the enigmatic Goldens are the perfect subject for a screenplay. He ingratiates himself with his new neighbors, gains entry to their fortress, and closely monitors their dramatic, tragic, and resounding struggles over the next eight years even as he is inexorably pulled into the molten heart of this doomed kingdom-in-exile. Rushdie's galvanizing epic of the fall of civilizations attacked from within is spiked with references to ancient Greece and Rome, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and a litany of recent American mass and police shootings and other horrific crimes. It is also electric with literary echoes from Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald, and vivid with cinematic tributes to Buñuel, Bergman, and Hitchcock. This contextual amplitude is matched by narrative complexity as René experiments with different approaches to a story that is forever intensifying. He tinkers with form and facts, aiming for Operatic Realism as he recounts ruthless Nero's seduction by the coldly calculating Russian, Vasilisa; autistic Petya's hidden life as a brilliant video-game inventor; Apu's increasing fame and susceptibility to visions; the two brothers' disastrous rivalry over Ubah Tuur, a serenely elegant Somali sculptor; and D's paralyzing struggle over his (or her) gender identity, a theme Rushdie handles with delving sensitivity and forthright inquiry as does Arundhati Roy in another major novel of the season, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Crimes of passion and greed escalate; the Goldens' past (which opens a portal onto India's systemic corruption, international criminal gangs, and terrorism) catches up to them; and the body count rises as René, in love with his gifted colleague, Suchitra Roy, harbors his own explosive secret. His entanglement with lies and subterfuge inspires a vehement critique of our descent into an age of bitterly contested realities in which facts and those who illuminate them scientists, historians, and journalists are vociferously and perversely condemned as elitist and fake. As the 2016 presidential campaign roars to its, for many, shocking conclusion, René describes one candidate as the Joker and the other as Batwoman, declaring, America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe. There is a scorching immediacy and provocation to Rushdie's commanding tragedy of the self-destruction of a family of ill-gotten wealth and sinister power, of ambition and revenge, and the rise of a mad, vulgar, avaricious demigod hawking radical untruth and seeding chaos. The Golden House is a headlines-stoked novel-on-fire sure to incite discussion. But it is also a ravishingly well-told, deeply knowledgeable, magnificently insightful, and righteously outraged epic that poses timeless questions about the human condition. Can a person be both good and evil? Is family destiny? Does the past always catch up to us? In a time of polarizing extremes, can we find common ground? Will despots and their supporters be forever with us? Will humankind ever learn? Can story and art enlighten us? As Rushdie's blazing tale surges toward its crescendo, life, as it always has, rises stubbornly from the ashes, as does love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ACCORDING TO THE PUBLISHER, "The Golden House" marks Salman Rushdie's "return to realism." An epigraph, however, suggests otherwise: "Give me a copper penny and I'll tell you a golden story." And in an early chapter, the narrator notes that a "golden story" in Roman times "was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue." The narrator's description is the more candid. The plot does not fit neatly into any realist box. A mysterious septuagenarian billionaire, Nero Golden, and his three adult sons take up residence in a mansion in downtown New York. They come from "the country that could not be named" (although it is swiftly named as India). As we must expect, given that the patriarch has assumed the name of the last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the family's fall is comprehensive. And, yes, Nero does indeed whip out a violin at the requisite moments. Summarizing the action without including spoilers is tricky, so let's just say that the body count is high. There are assassinations (four or possibly five), a mass shooting, a suicide and of course there is a fire that leads to more deaths. This tale is narrated by a 20-something New Yorker, "a would-be writer of films" who views the arrival of the Golden family as "the big project for which I had, with growing desperation, been searching." He befriends the Goldens with the intention of making a movie about them, being "absolutely clear ... that these people were worth spying on." The origins of the Goldens remain shrouded "for two entire presidential terms." Only the narrator ("Call me René," he tells us in one of the novel's many literary allusions) and his parents know their true identity: They are (nonpracticing) Muslims from Mumbai who are "fleeing from a terrorist tragedy and a grievous loss," the death of Mrs. Golden in the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in November 2008. Why this tragedy should have occasioned in Nero a desire for such a complete reinvention of the family identity and an absolute break with the past ("Do not tell them the name of the place we left. Never speak of it," he instructs his sons) provides the meat of the back story, a mystery that is finally unraveled as the lives of the Golden clan unravel themselves. It is René, however, who is the novel's biggest presence. At first he adopts the first-person plural (the collective voice of the local residents, minor characters, he later explains, who "might not make it past the cutting-room floor") and informs us that he is "by nature self-effacing." And yet by Page 24, he has overcome his shyness. He is, we learn, the offspring of two Belgian academics: "Do you note, in their son, an inherited note of the professorial?" René certainly is fond of lecturing - on Greek tragedy, Roman history and literary fiction, among other things - but the "inherited note" is nonetheless difficult to detect. Speaking about the difference between New York and the rest of the United States, Rene's father declares, "Iss a bubble, like everyone says now.... Iss like in de Jim Carrey movie, only expanded to big-city size." Rene's mother hands him a folder detailing the Goldens' past: "In the age of information, my dear... everyone's garbage is on display for all to see." Professorial indeed, though it raises the question of why nobody else did a little Googling. The narrator permits his filmmaker's imagination to rove freely. After all, he is no mere observer, but an "imagineer," a cocreator, as it were, of the Goldens' story. When Nero Golden falls in lust/love with Vasilisa, a beautiful young Russian, René displays an uncharacteristic hesitancy as he ventures into their bedroom scene: "I rear back and halt myself, ashamed, prufrocked into a sudden pudeur, for, after all, how should I presume? Shall I say, I have known them all, I have seen her like a yellow fog rubbing her back against, rubbing her muzzle upon, shall I say, licking her tongue into the corners of his evening?" Barely has he set T S. Eliot spinning in his grave, when he just as suddenly loses his proclaimed pudeur and dives right in. Scenes that could otherwise only be rendered by an omniscient narrator, or by alternating the characters' perspectives, are punctuated with directions like Cut, Blackout, Wipe, so René can tell us whatever we need to know. Sometimes we are treated to a few pages of film script or monologue (which presumably will form part of the script). When two of the characters take a trip to Mumbai, René wishes he could tag along. "It might be an important part of the story," he grumbles to his girlfriend, Suchitra. When she tells him to use his imagination, make it up, René professes to be "a little shocked." In the nick of time, he recalls that this is "a golden story ... a wild conceit" and goes right ahead. All this is good fun, up to a point. But René becomes a tiresome companion. Partly because of his incessant film references (sometimes whole pages of them). Partly because of his addiction to celebrity roll calls: He's worked with "Jessica Chastain, Keanu Reeves, James Franco, Olivia Wilde"; from Suchitra's apartment he spies Brad Pitt's pied-â-terre; he's told by one of Nero's sons that he's "more handsome" than Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and George Clooney. René demurs, of course. Most tiresomely, he appears unable to think of women as anything other than stereotypes. Vasilisa, in a pair of monologues, is depicted as, ultimately, a scheming whore and a Russian witch, while Suchitra is a "Hindu goddess." Naturally, when Vasilisa calls René a "gorgeous boy" and asks him to impregnate her, he finds "the offer of her body overwhelming" and is thrilled to discover "it was her firm conviction that baby-making required extreme excitement." Suchitra is more practical: "Just get inside me now," she says, "being the type who came quickly and often." Oh, the lucky man! With no apparent sense of irony, René proclaims he is "becoming famous" for his political videos "attacking the Republican insensitivity to women's issues." Nero's sons - Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus, as they have chosen to call themselves (Petya, Apu and D, for short) - are all extraordinary characters. Petya is agoraphobic, "on the autism spectrum" and a "21st-century genius." Apu is a spiritual seeker and "an exceptionally gifted painter." D grapples with gender identity issues, which gives rise to the most complex and sensitively imagined scenes in the novel. Collectively, their story lines are high-octane vehicles for observations on everything from art to gun violence, told with Rushdie's customary brio and narrative panache, and the reader is happy to go along for the ride. The real weakness, the hollow heart of the novel, is René. The publisher's description compares "The Golden House" to "The Great Gatsby," and there's more than one textual reference to Fitzgerald's novel. Thus we look to René as a parallel Nick Carraway, to restore, perhaps, a moral compass to the proceedings. René, however, though he claims to be "self aware," never demonstrates that quality. He ruthlessly exploits his connection with the Goldens, whom he describes as "my passports to my cinematic future." He commits multiple betrayals. And when those betrayals threaten to undo him, he is only sorry that he did not put himself center stage. "I failed to see that I was the subject. ... To be untrue to thyself, youth!, that is the highest treason." When the Joker-Batwoman (read: Trump-Clinton) presidential election is underway, René and Suchitra make political cartoons that René (with typical modesty) declares "defined the struggle." The Joker, of course, wins, "his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a Klansman's hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood." Despite (or because of) all the apostrophizing, René fails to demonstrate any insight into why "60-million-plus" brought the Joker to power. He finds it "hard to hold on to that belief in the good to which I dedicated myself." Although it may appear to the reader that he has mainly dedicated himself to himself. In any case, he is richly (I use the word advisedly) rewarded for his troubles. Perhaps this is cleverly reflective of "our age of bitterly contested realities," in which one man's morality is another man's evil. It may not be the novel we long for, but it could, just possibly, be the novel we deserve. A 'golden story' in Romem times 'was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tede.'
Library Journal Review
Must one's past always inform the present? Can a man avoid karma? Is the United States still a haven for reinventing oneself? Booker and Whitbread Award winner Rushdie (Midnight's Children) poses these and other conundrums in a novel grounded in historical fact yet rife with Rushdie's signature imaginative prowess. The Gardens, a cloistered neighborhood in New York's Greenwich Village, represents a microcosm of our world as it appeared after the 2008 financial meltdown. Narrator Rene is a struggling filmmaker in search of a subject. When the inscrutable Nero Golden and his three sons arrive from Mumbai to take up residence in their palatial home fronting the Gardens, they appear pleased to oblige. Rene insinuates himself into the lives of agoraphobic Petya, artist Apu, and Dionysus, the gender-fluid youngest of the brothers. Over an eight- year span, Rene follows and films the enigmatic Goldens as they struggle to attain the American dream, eventually compromising his objectivity through a risky sexual liaison. Though the story is Shakespearean in its tragic elements, Rushdie manages to have fun with his readers, showcasing his cultural erudition with multiple references to music, film, and literature. Verdict Expanding upon the interpretation of the personal as political, Rushdie should garner even more readers with this cautionary tale of the long reach of terrorism and the demise of the American ideal. [See Prepub Alert, 3/8/17.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.